


the aerodynamic properties of eggs

by andreaphobia



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Never Met, Copious amounts of Haru logic, Dare, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Haru being Haru, Haru makes total sense, House egging, M/M, Meet-Cute, a love letter to quirky Haruka, accidental asking out on a date, more like fake exes, written by an unexpectedly smitten Makoto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 04:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16110905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: If this was the last thing Makoto ever did, he wanted everyone to know that it was one hundred percent, without a shadow of a doubt,entirelyKisumi’s fault.Makoto eggs Haruka's house for a dare, then ends up asking him out.





	the aerodynamic properties of eggs

 

 

If this was the last thing Makoto ever did, he wanted everyone to know that it was one hundred percent, without a shadow of a doubt, _entirely_ Kisumi’s fault.

He can think of roughly a million other places he’d rather be, and a billion other things he’d rather be doing. Like... flossing, or folding his underpants. Doing his math homework. Literally _anything_ besides standing in the middle of a dark street somewhere in his neighborhood, clutching a carton of eggs, and trying not to hyperventilate until he blacks out.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and without having to look, he knows what it says. It’s either Kisumi or Asahi, reminding him of the terms of their game. Trying to make sure he doesn’t chicken out. This is a real problem when it comes to Makoto, who is not big on rule-breaking as a whole. Without the reminder that someone out there is keeping tabs on him, he probably wouldn’t be here at all.

Fortunately for the two of them, while Makoto doesn’t make a habit of juvenile delinquency, he _is_ susceptible to peer pressure. Which brings us to the present: Tachibana Makoto has to egg someone’s house.

Why? Because he was dared to, and Kisumi and Asashi already did: it’s as simple as that. Furthermore, neither of them got caught doing it, which raises the stakes somewhat. Now, not only does Makoto have to egg a house, he must also completely avoid detection, Mission Impossible-style. And, if he _should_ be caught, he’s on his own—he’ll have to talk his own way out of it.

(Such are the ways of young men and the idiotic games they play with each other.)

In the first place, Makoto wonders, in increasingly growing dismay, how _does_ one egg a house? He hasn’t the faintest idea. Oh, sure, he can make an educated guess based purely on the necessary physical logistics of it—you know, reach into carton, grasp egg firmly in hand, fling egg, repeat until someone calls the cops, and then hightail it out of there.

But it’s the other stuff that isn’t so clear. Should he stand on the sidewalk to maintain plausible deniability, or get way up close so he doesn’t miss? Would it be more efficient to try throwing the whole carton at once, and, if so, should he do it underhand or overhead? Is an airborne egg likely to retain its physical integrity as it flies, or is there a chance of, say, spontaneous egg combustion?

His phone buzzes again, insistently, and he almost drops the entire carton of eggs on his foot.

“Okay, okay, I got it already,” he mumbles, although it’s not like Kisumi or Asahi can hear him. There’s nothing else for it—he has to do it, consequences be damned.

Makoto fumbles the carton open, then stares at the contents within, immediately paralyzed by the array of choices laid out before him. Should he start with the egg in the top left corner? The one next to it? How much of an effect does the size and shape of the egg have on its aerodynamic properties? Also, does any of this even _matter_?

He shuts his eyes and snatches one at random, partially squishing it in his panic. This almost certainly compromises its aerodynamic properties; nevertheless, with eyes still shut, he draws his arm back over his shoulder and then flings the fistful of crushed egg in the general direction of the house. And that’s when the lights go on.

Makoto leaps several feet into the air, lets out a high-pitched whisper-scream, and actually does drop the carton of eggs on his foot. Then stumbles, and steps on them, for good measure. A shadowy figure has peeled away from the tree in the front yard, solidifying into the shape of a man. The man is holding a flashlight, the beam of which is pointed directly at Makoto’s face, blinding him.

“So,” a gruff voice says, “you’ve been egging houses on this street, have you?”

“NO!” Makoto wails, immediately. He shields his eyes, which allows him to sort of make out some of the details of the figure who’s standing in the yard pointing the flashlight at him. An adult. An older man, who looks _very_ grumpy indeed. And not at all impressed by Makoto’s denial, either—understandably, given the egg bits dripping from his hand and the carton of broken eggs under his feet.

“A _likely_ story,” the man says, brusquely. “Trying to play dumb even though you’ve been caught in the act, eh?” At last, he lowers the flashlight and crosses his arms, which gives Makoto’s eyes a bit of a reprieve. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Without any apparent input or engagement from his brain, Makoto’s mouth leaps into action. He babbles something only partially coherent about a dare, something about his friends doing it first and feeling like he had to and he’s really sorry he didn’t mean it he’ll never do it again he doesn’t even _like_ eggs—

“—I see,” the man interrupts, after listening to this word vomit for a solid twenty seconds. “A dare... is that right?” He shakes his head, sighing heavily. “You know, lad, you’re about my Haruka’s age. You really ought to know better.”

Alarm bells are going off in Makoto’s head, but unfortunately his brain is still out to sea, so his mouth can no longer be stopped. It has latched on to the name ‘Haruka’ as someone who can be used as an excuse, and barrels on into oblivion, guns a-blazin’.

“Haruka—um—we—it—my friends dared me—because we’d—gone out on a date—but it didn’t—I mean— _we_ didn’t work out—but I still—”

The man stares at him.

“You... went out with Haruka?” he asks, in a very funny tone of voice.

There’s a lengthy pause, during which Makoto’s brain labors to catch up to the conversation of the past couple of minutes. Then another one, during which he screams internally and tries to rewind time to that period of blissful ignorance, before he was aware of the words that had just come out of his own mouth.

“Uhm...” Finally, Makoto decides that—if nothing else—he can at least make his story internally consistent. (He intuits that this will probably be a mark in his favor, when he’s going up on the stand in juvie court.) “Yes...?”

It comes out sounding like a question, but fortunately the man doesn’t seem to notice. He fixes Makoto with an unreadable look, which lasts for so long that Makoto hyperfixates on the feeling of the sweat dripping down the back of his neck, and starts to panic.

Then the man switches off his flashlight, tucks it under his arm, and turns over his shoulder to bellow, “HARUKA! Get out here!”

After an excruciating minute, the porch light on the front of the house comes on, and the front door swings open. A slim figure emerges from the house wearing flip flops, trotting down the gravel pathway and then down the lawn (taking care to avoid the aborted egg splatter that only ended up making it halfway to the house).

The figure comes up next to the man, who Makoto assumes is his dad, and looks back and forth between the two of them, expressionlessly.

“...What?”

Makoto gulps. Okay, first of all, Haruka is a _guy_. Which—not a bad thing, but definitely a surprise. Second of all, he’s—uh—how do you say it? Oh, right— _smokin’_ hot. Shorter than Makoto, with dark, silky hair and blue eyes; nice wrists and cheekbones, and a tight waist that looks just the perfect size for Makoto to grab him by and carry him around. Nice mouth, too, and kinda... _sexy..._ lips. (Even in the privacy of his own head, this thought is enough to make him blush.)

“Boy said he wants to talk to you,” Haruka’s father says, his voice gone weirdly gruff again. “I’ll—uh—leave you two to it.”

“I thought you were trying to catch the kid who was egging houses on our street.”

“Never you mind that. Just—tell me about it later, okay?”

He claps Haruka on the shoulder affectionately, then turns and heads back up into the house.

Haruka watches him leave blankly. Eventually, he turns back to Makoto. He doesn’t say anything, however, and at this point Makoto becomes acutely aware that he is still standing there with egg drippings on his hand, and is standing on a carton of eggs. (As far as good first impressions ago, he figures this probably doesn’t even make the top two hundred.)

“Uh—sorry.” Good start—but future prospects are dim. Anyway, given the fact that he’s been caught with egg on face (and hand—and shoe), he feels like he may as well be honest. What has he got to lose? “My friends dared me to egg your house, and your, um, your dad caught me. So I told him that we... er...” This part is a bit of a sticking point, but he stands firm, “...that it was because we... um... broke up.”

Haruka blinks.

“But we’ve never dated,” he points out, quite reasonably.

“You’re right, we haven’t.”

“I don’t think we’ve even met.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

With the facts of the matter confirmed, Haruka lapses back into what appears to be a thoughtful silence. Makoto is just starting to wonder if he can excuse himself to go wash the egg off his hand yet when Haruka finally speaks.

“But we need to break up anyway.”

“Uhm...” Makoto tries to think about this logically, but his brain is fried. He shrugs, instead. “I guess so? Yeah.”

Haruka nods, like it’s all starting to make sense now. “So we should go out on a date.”

“Yeah, we—wait, _what_? That wasn’t what I—”

Makoto’s idiot mouth is on the cusp of producing another stream of idiocy when his brain finally seizes the wheel, stopping it in its tracks before it can scuttle his chances with smokin’-hot Haruka any worse. “You... _want_ to go out with me?”

“It only makes sense,” Haruka says—slower this time, as though he’s talking to a moron, which is both kinda funny and also really rude. “We need to break up. But we’ve never dated. So we should date... so that we can break up.”

Makoto blinks. If you selectively disengage all the parts of the brain that process conscious thought, he supposes it almost starts to make a weird kind of sense.

“Uh... where do you... want to go, then?”

Haruka doesn’t hesitate. “The beach. I’m free this weekend.”

On some level, Makoto is starting to feel as though he is perhaps just having a very weird and specific dream. However, dream or not, Haruka still has a sexy mouth and a sexy everything else, too, so at this point it seems reasonable to decide that he’s just going to go wherever this wild ride takes him.

His phone buzzes again, reminding him of its existence. Thanks to that, it occurs to him that maybe they should exchange numbers, so he reaches into his pocket to grab it, and by the time he remembers he has eggy hands it’s already too late.

“Oh, crap—darn it.” Helplessly, he wipes his phone screen off on the seat of his jeans, and then his hand as well, because what the hell, right? “Here, do you want to give me your number, then? Sorry about the... um... the egg.”

Haruka takes the phone from him without a word, dials in a number, then hands it back. Makoto saves it into his contacts, then returns the phone to his pocket.

That seems to be that, and he’s not sure what to do next, so he just laughs, awkwardly. “So... see you on Saturday, I guess...?”

“Bye,” Haruka says, turning to go back into his house.

Part of Makoto feels like he’s won the lottery; another part suspects he’s actually making a mistake. (The last part just enjoys the sight of Haruka walking away; those jeans look like they were made to be peeled off of him.)

The door shuts behind Haruka, and then the porch light goes out, leaving Makoto standing alone in the dark.

For quite some time, he doesn’t move, still processing the events of the last ten minutes. Eventually it occurs to him that he’s got texts waiting, and re-extracts his phone. There are several unread messages in his inbox:

> _10:31pm > no waiting! no pulling out! the house must be egged! THE GAME HAS SPOKEN! _
> 
> _10:32pm > did you get caught? _
> 
> _10:37pm > you got caught, didn’t you?! _
> 
> _10:40pm > WE’RE DISAVOWING ALL KNOWLEDGE OF YOU, OPERATIVE MAKOTO!!! _

Makoto sighs, scrapes a fleck of egg shell off his phone’s screen, and hesitantly types out a reply to the last message.

> _10:42pm > I’m not really sure what just happened, but I... got a date, somehow? _

The reply is nearly instantaneous (“ _WHAT?!?!?!_ ”, though depicted here with less punctuation for brevity’s sake), but Makoto has already put his phone away. After being put through the wringer like _that_ , the least he can do for revenge is make them wait a couple of hours for all the juicy details.

As he reaches down to scoop up his ruined carton of eggs, it occurs to him that he never told Haruka his name. Makoto’s gotta admit, he admires the chutzpah of a guy who’ll ask a complete stranger out without even knowing what to call him. Well, that’s what he got Haruka’s number for (and thank God he'd had the foresight for it).

Feeling strangely cheerful for no particular reason at all, he picks up his eggs and heads on home.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Not sure if I'll continue this yet, but probably. Send me a good idea and I'll run with it.
> 
> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://andreaphobia.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/andreaphobia).


End file.
